I Heart Heartland

February 16th, 2012 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

The unauthorized release of supposedly scandalous Heartland Institute documents has been pretty thoroughly addressed on many blogs over the last day or so. The documents are being used in an attempt to “expose” a “well-funded” “climate denial machine”, which is laughable on several levels.

The only document involved that could be viewed as damning in any way is almost certainly a fake. The others are fairly boring, unless you really are surprised that any organization would take (very modest) donations to explore alternative hypotheses on the subject of global warming and climate change.

Supporting alternative hypotheses in science…what a scandal!

Only fringe lunatic save-the-Earth-by-killing-everyone-but-me types could really believe that any organization would actually promote “dissuading teachers from teaching science”. The person who wrote this obviously fraudulent Heartland goal clearly knows little about science or what kind of organization Heartland is.

That so many media outlets (especially the Guardian) ran with the story without checking its veracity is another black eye for what passes as journalism these days.

I know Joe Bast, the president and CEO of Heartland. He is of the highest character and intelligence, and I would consider his motives on the climate subject to be at or above anyone I have met in this business, on either side of the issue. This is why I agree to take part in the Heartland climate conferences, for less than half of my normal speaking fee. I don’t necessarily agree with all the science and ideas presented there, but I would rather it be presented and discussed than be censored, which is the U.N. IPCC’s modus operandi.

The last conference even showcased a debate between me (a “luke-warmer”, I’m told) and a scientist-supporter of the IPCC position. That’s a level of openness you will not find on the IPCC’s side of the issue.

Due to popular demand, Joe organized the last conference without sufficient funding. At the end of the conference he confided that he was still trying to find donors who would cover the expenses. It almost seemed like his organization really didn’t need the headaches involved in the effort, but no one else was stepping up to the plate to do a job which needed to be done.

The real scandal is that it took a private organization like Heartland to compile the hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific publications which suggest that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might not be a problem for humanity or the biosphere. This is what the IPCC should have done, if it had any scientific objectivity.

I hope that this hoax backfires on the person who started it. I hope it leads to even more donations to Heartland, which has played the role of David in its battle against the Goliath multi-billion dollar climate alarmist machine.

Desperate attempts of a failing ideology (that was always, ultimately, destined to failure).

Remember Copernicus, Galileo, and the Catholic Church – with NO disrespect meant to Catholics or the Catholic Church. For the outcome of that “gaia-centric” view of the universe ideology vs. empirical reality is instructive in this case. And then some.

The supposed “denialist machine” suffers no damage in this episode. The only damage is to Greenpeace, NRCD, Sierra, etc. and outfits like Think Progress (Climate Progress, Joe Romm) and Desmogblog. Now more of the general populace will understand that its farcical to suggest that Heartland’s budget and “denialist” efforts could possibly threaten the money-machine that is AGW Thermageddon. These organizations have budgets that are 15 – 50 times the size of Heartland’s. And now the public will see exactly what lengths the Thermageddon machine will go to in order to protect their ideology from scrutiny.

No matter, Roy, your satellite data and other empirical evidence will tell the story in the end. Just keep doing what you and John are doing. Let the chips fall. I’m confident we’ll be on the right side of this issue when the history is written.

Meanwhile, to those of us who understand something about human health and the environment, and the prioritization of human need NOW as opposed to some theoretical distant risk, it remains shameful that the US govt. has spent $100 BILLION since 1999 (a CBO figure, not a “Heartland” or similar pronouncement) on “climate policy”.

What good could have been done for human health and the environment with that $100 BILLION? With 1-2 billion people living off a dollar a day, without access to sufficient clean water and food, with zero access to healthcare, who cook food over dung when they’ve cut down all their trees for fuel, with high infant mortality rates and half the West’s life expectancy, wasting $100 BILLION on “climate policy” is the real crime, folks.

You should know, just for the record, that many of us are quite familiar with Church history and you appear to be ignorant of it.
The Church did not oppose Copernicus. The priest from Poland named Copernicus, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and others expressed the view that the earth and planets orbited the sun long before Galileo and never encountered opposition from the Holy See (Catholic Church). Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium on the subject in 1543. The theory goes back to the time of Pythagoras (580-500 B.C.). It was probably known to the early inhabitants of central America (Mayans I believe) who had an accurate solar calendar, the same as that corrected by Pope Gregory XIII. The church did not oppose it.
The question at issue between Galileo and the Holy See (Catholic Church) was not the theory of Copernicus, but the interpretation of the passage in Chapter X of Josue, which says that “the sun and the moon stood still.” Galileo was not content with affirming the truth of the Copernican Theory, but he declared that the sun was immovable, and that the bible was therefore in error. This is proved by a letter written by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (now canonized) to Foscarini Galileo’s friend. In this letter the Cardinal states that “there would be no objection on the part of the Congregation to putting forward the system of Copernicus as the best explanation of the celestial phenomena provided no reference was made to the apparent conflict with the Bible.” In the actual text of the condemnation the very first words are that the Congregation declares heretical the teaching of Galileo that the sun is immovable.
Of course science has progressed significantly since the time of Galileo. We now know the Sun rotates on it’s axix, and is definitely not immovable as Galileo claimed. In the battle between ideology vs. empirical reality Galileo lost. Historical myths and untruth cannot change the facts of history.

Roy, you make me cringe at calling them the “Heartless institute”, however, they do support tobacco and even if I agree with them on global warming … even if I very much want to support them, I cannot be hypocritical and support them in one way and not in another.

Having said that, there is a point at which the argument is so one sided that one has to support what they do, even if I cannot keep quiet about their work on tobacco.

As for the documents. We can hardly complain about illegally obtained documents after climategate. Technically the climategate emails should have been released under FOI, but…

However, the real scandal is clearly the way some journalists jumped on this story and spread information from what was clearly forged documents. And it is impossible not to contrast their behavior on these clearly forged documents with their claim to have to check the climategate emails thoroughly before finally (after every other organisation had mentioned them) finally reluctantly admitting that the “some emails have been hacked by evil people who deny the undeniable truth of … and its all a fuss over nothing … except of course the horrendous hacking of emails”

Not sure who you are claiming called them the “Heartless Institute”…not me.

Even though my own father suffered a slow death from cigarettes, Heartland’s involvement in the *secondhand* smoke debate 20 years ago is not a sufficient distraction for me to fault them in the global warming debate now. We know our government has a knee-jerk tendency to regulate anything that has any evidence of being harmful, and so it is legitimate to question claims of “guilt” just as a defendant in a trial has a right to a defense.

Sometimes the defense will be right, sometimes wrong, but until guilt is convincingly established I would prefer to err on the side of personal freedom rather than tyranny.

Unfortunately the damage has been done – no matter that what has been revealed is pretty dull and the only thing vaguely interesting is probably faked – in the minds of many people the ‘well-funded sceptic machine’ meme will be confirmed.

The only hope is that the one or more of the documents does turn out to be faked, and that there’s an arrest to back that up.

For those of us on the sceptic side we can say ‘nothing here to see, move along,’ but the Guardian, BBC and the rest of the well-funded alarmist machine (!) have inflicted the damage already.

To me, the fraudulent way in which the Heartland docs and the Climategate e-mails were obtained is sort of a tit-for-tat.
Both organizations are justifiably outraged, and have the right to pursue legal recourse, if they have any.

Since we spectators use the Climategate e-mails to peer into the inner workings of the IPCC intelligentsia, it seems equally fair (or unfair) that we get a glimpse into Heartland activities.

Not excusing it, just saying that it would be a little hypocritical to embrace one and shun the other.

The tactic used here by Desmogblog is hardly new at all, in its basic form. Promoters of AGW seem to have little confidence in the IPCC’s position, to they go after the critics instead. This arguably started in the mid ’80s over CFCs, and if folks will take the time to remember, Dr S Fred Singer was in the midst of that. Then it spilled over into AGW, and we need only recall the dust-up Al Gore had with Fred Singer about the Roger Revelle / Cosmos article, where Singer ultimately won a libel suit over it.

Watch Gore’s movie at the 1 hr,12-to-14 minute point and you see the comparison made between so-called tobacco industry ‘shill experts’ and skeptic climate scientists, he has words from a so-called leaked memo spelled out across the screen, “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact”. This is the only fallback position Gore has when it comes to advising the public to ignore skeptics – “skeptics are paid to lie”.

But in all my online writings, I point out myriad crippling problems with the accusation. Where did Gore get it from? Anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan. Who has been Desmogblog’s star blogger for all but the first three months of its existence? Ross Gelbspan.

I don’t mean to sound self-promoting, the irony is I don’t want to do this at all, but I feel duty-bound to tell the story when journalists seemingly cannot lift a finger to check the veracity of Gelbspan’s accusation, despite a sea of red flags that are so easily found within it.

The Heartland documents and Climategate e-mails all prove that vastly greater transparency is required of everyone, but especially the IPCC since UN rules can be binding on nations forced to endure them often with little or no justification.
However, I have an unrelated question to ask you. The recent global temperature increase (indirectly observed by MSU satellite data since 1998) is apparently consistent with the greenhouse effect and as you have pointed out humans seem to be responsible since we are pumping twice the CO2 into the atmosphere that appears from the increased atmospheric CO2 measured in Mona Loa. Nature as you mentioned seems to be cleaning up half the CO2. However, scientists (Dr. James Gordon Prather, Sir Robert Robinson and possibly others) have pointed out that the CO2 in the atmosphere appears to be of biological origin in that it lacks the carbon 13 isotope that plants have difficulty synthesizing. They also point out that the earth’s hydrocarbons the deeper one drills into the earth do not appear to be lacking the carbon 13 isotope and therefore are likely abiotic. Have you researched this topic and do you have any information to share about it?

Just a note regarding my last post. My last post seems to suggest that you support anthropogenic global warming. That wasn’t my meaning. I simply suggested the data supported human contribution to green house gasses in the atmosphere. I apologize for any confusion.

I may not agree with the hard line stance that Richard Dawkins takes on religion, but I think he plays a valuable service in offering a counterbalancing perspective.

Because of so much nonsense published in climate science these days (and by that I mean really bad papers, and not necessarily all from one side), Heartland plays an important role. Now in a perfect world I wouldn’t like to see Heartland funding climate scientists in the same way I’m not comfortable with activist groups such as World Wildlife Fund and various NGO’s “covering the expenses of” IPCC climate scientists. Unfortunately, given the current situation – a marriage of politics and science – I’m glad they do what they do.

There are two big differences: One, CRU is a public institution that was actively trying to avoid their FOI obigations while HI is a private group; and two, there is a distinct possibility that the CRU leaks were the activity of a whistleblower while the HI documents were a) obtained through ID fraud and b) (in at least one case) faked. I see no moral equilance between the two situations.

I’m not saying there is moral equivalence between the 2 instances of information release/theft…I agree there probably isn’t. I’m instead saying there is equivalence in we as spectators *using* the materials from the 2 sources.

I must disagree with you on the tit-for-tat issue of Heartland docs and the Climategate e-mails.

First, the main document of interest in the Heartland docs – the strategy document – is most likely a fake. I do not believe any of the 5000 emails have been shown as fakes.

Second, Climategate showed that the scientific consensus had standards and certainties that fell well below its public image. The Heartland documents show the Institute funds dissemination of information and punches well above its weight.

However, Dr Spencer, I congratulate you on engaging with an organisation with which you do not entirely agree. The element I most dislike about “climate change” is the attempts to shut down contrary views and discouraging people to consider perspectives other than their own.

I wish to comment on the sentence above: “There is no global cooling. Prove it!” It all depends on what time period we are considering and the data set that is used. If we take the average of the following 4 data sets: HADCRUT3VGL, GISTEMP, UAH and RSS for the last 10 years, we get a slope of -0.00383708 per year. Now whether or not this is significant or over a long enough time period is a totally different but valid question.

Besides, the Copernican theory made no improvements over the Ptolemaic theory when it came to trying to explain the movements of the planets.

Epicycles were still necessary to explain past observations, and newer ones required constant modifications of the epicycle schemes.

The two approaches gave mathematically identical (and identically erroneous) results.

It was Johannes Kepler’s revolutionary idea of elliptical orbits with varying speeds that was the true breakthrough, because it successfully accounted for and predicted planetary motions within the (then current) limits of observation.

And it provided real evidence of the general heliocentric concept (heliofocal, anyway, since an ellipse has no centre) since the Laws of motion like ‘equal area through equal time’ only made sense if the Sun were at the focus of the elliptical orbits.

Galileo got all sorts of credit because his name made the news of the time, while Kepler spent almost all his adult life doing the hard work with little recognition except among scientists.

The Copernican system could not be more accurate because Copernicus assumed that the planets moved in circular orbits. It was possibly no worse than the Ptolemaic system in terms of accuracy but it was preferable because it made far fewer ad hoc assertions. A theory that makes fewer ad hoc assumptions but is in similar agreement in terms of observational data is always to be preferred.

It should also be noted that Johannes Kepler had his own rather odd ideas on the nature of the cosmos, but should be fully credited with the discovery that the planets orbited in ellipses.

Dr Roy, I don’t have a problem with your being generally supportive of Heartland on one matter (climate) and being at odds with them on tobacco; not that I know what their tobacco stance was. Think tanks often handle many diverse subjects which may have split followings.

As to the taxpayer funded Climategate e-mails, which were the subject of FOIA requests; there is NO evidence that they actually were stolen by a hacker or hackers, rather than deliberately released by insider(s).

But it is quite amusing to see the holier than thou NYT getting egg all over their face with an “authoritative” view of this faked Heartland “Document” assertion.

Finally, do you guys ever wonder why over 30,000 scientists have now signed a statement showing they disagree with the AGW conjecture? There is absolutely zero warming effect for carbon dioxide – it is far more likely to cool the surface by absorbing some incoming IR radiation which is about half the Sun’s spectrum. I wonder why the IPCC didn’t mention this.

So … do you ever wonder why we see an article such as on WUWT today in which one such scientist says …

“Suffice to say, the “climate science” served up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been a pack of lies from the day it first convened. Its “science” was based on computer models rigged by co-conspirators that include Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia.

“The original leak of their emails in November 2009 instantly revealed the extent of their efforts to spread the hoax and to suppress any expression of doubt regarding it. A second release in 2011 confirmed what anyone paying any attention already knew.

“The “warmists”, a name applied to global warming hoaxers, launched into a paroxysm of denial that has not stopped to this day. Their respective universities have since engaged in every possible way to hide the documentation they claimed supported their claims. Suffice to say, the global warming hoax was the golden goose for everyone who received literally billions in public and private funding.”

.. the most controversial sentence reads, “His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science”.. sounds more like a grammatical fluke or mis-statement od words at worst, and nothing to be taken at face value. Worst case scenario, all it is saying is that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain, so that teachers may instead choose to put as more emphasis on science that is certain and non-controversial (unlike climate science). At the K-12 level, this is a legitimate objective (how much time do kids need to spend learning about something that is fundamentally unknown when there are so many other important and known things to spend time on). Furthermore, it doesn’t even make any sense if taken literally — are critics of the Heartland seriously suggesting Heartland is investing good money to develop a curriculum that fully reveals the uncertainties in climate science — only so that this curriculum will never be taught? Even if the document weren’t a fake, which it sounds like they probably are, it’s clearly a case of bad wording rather than the preposterous objective that some people are making it out to be.

As for the statement about Watts, it just says they are helping him find sources of funding. So what?

Finally, the statement re: Forbes “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out…” even if true, again, so what? They are a private organization promoting a specific agenda, much like Greenpeace, and I am sure organizations like Greenpeace say these sort of things all the time. It’s not like the guy who wrote this is a agent of government or someone working on the public dime. Note — there is nothing to suggest here that the Heartland even has any power to keep Forbes from publishing the articles that are being published there.

I’m not saying that those couple pages are an authentic Heartland Institute document, I’m just saying, even if it were true, so what?

For the first time, I am contributing to The Heartland Institute. This ordeal has prompted this action as it has highlighted the good that The Heartland Institute does, a cause that I am willing to support!

Well said Roy. The worst aspect of this is the lapping up by the media lap dogs — the product of their J-school indoctrination. The same creeps wouldn’t print a word about the unaltered and signficant ClimateGate emails.

So Heartland appears to have directly funded this:
The 2011 Interim Report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
The current report was coauthored by a team of scientists recruited and led by Craig D. Idso, Robert Carter, and S. Fred Singer. To schedule an interview with the authors and editors of Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, contact Jim Lakely, director of communications at The Heartland Institute

And there’s this in Chapter 1
McLean et al. (2009) quantified ?the effect of possible ENSO forcing on mean global temperature, both short-term and long-term,? using Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) data provided by the Australian government‘s Bureau of Meteorology.
When their work was completed, McLean et al. found ?change in SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA [Global Tropospheric Temperature Anomalies] for the 29-year-long MSU record and 68% of the variance in GTTA for the longer 50-year RATPAC record,? as well as ?81% of the variance in tropospheric temperature anomalies in the tropics,?
Consequently, the three researchers state as their final conclusion, ?natural climate forcing associated with ENSO is a major contributor to variability and perhaps recent trends in global temperature, a relationship that is not included in current global climate models.?
What they did state in their abstract:
…”the results suggest that the Southern Oscillation exercises a consistently dominant influence on mean global temperature, with a maximum effect in the tropics, except for periods when equatorial volcanism causes ad hoc cooling. That mean global tropospheric temperature has for the last 50 years fallen and risen in close accord with the SOI of 5–7 months earlier shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation.”

Now they reached this conclusion by a neat mathematical trick in which they took derivatives of the data, in effect removing any long term trend. And as anybody knows, ENSO is naturally an oscillation, it shows no long term trend. It doesn’t take much research to know these people are peddling scientific misinformation under the banner of Heartland funding.

Clearly something’s amiss when we get this continuing capaign of disinformation, alas any reasoning behind it is still lost in obscurity.

If a paper is wrong it will be ignored by the scientific community. Claims turn out to be the wrong all the time. What is both offensive and fascist in tone, is to declare papers (whether Warmist or Sceptical in tone) as “disinformation”. Give scientists credit for working out what is good work and what is bad work, which they will do in the long run. If you think the paper is wrong and it’s important enough to you, pull your finger out and write a paper to refute it. If you’re unable to do that, that just makes you another anonymous non-expert making bold pronouncements Ex Cathedra.

. . .We explain that climate, like many natural systems, exhibits “Hurst-Kolmogorov behavior”, which means it is intrinsically uncertain, with real limits to the potential for attribution and prediction. . . .
good communication leads to progress, progress is followed by arrogance, and arrogance is followed by loss of communication, which leads to stagnation, which is, we think, where science is now.

Note particularly their discussion of Hurst Kolgomorov dynamics.Memory in climate and things not to be forgotten
11th International Meeting on Statistical Climatology
Session 10: Long Term Memory
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 12-16 July, 2010

The paper by Carter, Mclean and Defreitas, was relevant in providing information on the influence of ENSO on the short term variability of temperatures due to the oscillation(approximately 0.6DC). IMHO an excellent analysis.
However for them to conclude, as I have quoted above, that somehow this is the whole story to the long-term temperature trends is “disinformation” and unsubstantiated.

Anybody who has researched the literature will know that their conclusions were false. It been done and dusted for a couple of years. Indeed, last year was the hottest La Nina year every recorded in a time of extremely low TSI.

So why does Heartland, and in OZ the Galileo Movement (with many of the same advisers), still propagate this fallacy that it’s valid? Disinformation it still is!

“Everybody knew” that Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein were ‘false’. Hansen’s 1988 global warming prediction has been proved false by observational data – yet it’s still treated as a canonical text by the IPCC. Why don’t you complain to them about their ‘disinformation’ campaign? And BTW, very few things actually are clear or obvious in climate science.

It’s not a crime practice acupuncture, homoeopathy or tarot card reading. The side effects of a new drug sometimes turn outs to be worse than what it was intended to cure. Scientists are not fools and can work out for themselves what is good and what is bad. Cranks can promote their ideas until they die of old age. They will just be ignored by smart people. The only thing offensive is your opinion that if someone disagrees with something you think you know, it should be made a thought crime.

Dr. Spencer, I’m not a Ph.D, accomplished scientist as you are, and my understand of climate science and meteorology is at the undergraduate level, but I am a subscriber to your theories (as well as Joe Bastardi’s) about the upcoming cooling in the years coming down the road and I am a believer in it, because to me, it’s very much common sense. I am a believer in this natural variation theory and not into the gloom and doom of AGW. I even did a research paper 15 years ago as sorta of a debunking of AGW. I did get an “A” on it and I’m not as educated as I am now on the subject, but I was at least ahead of my time on this I got to say. I am also censored in a manner of speaking. I post on other forums and boards about weather topics and often refer to you and Joe as credible sources that support my arguments and I get told I am an idiot and have no understanding whatsoever and that I am politically driven. Which is funny since I don’t even vote and have typically voted liberal, not conservative. I have to say that the AGW side of this is loaded with people that do not tolerate holes in their argument. To me that’s just not the spirit of science. I would never mean disrespect to any scientist that supports AGW or anyone else. I simply want to engage in discussion that I think it’s very, very reasonable to doubt AGW and that its position is a precarious one. Environmental rules are promulgated daily that are over the top due to AGW and more will follow. Money down the tubes for something that probably doesn’t even exist. And having worked in the air quality sector for 11 years, I just feel it’s my duty to support what I believe is right. My point is that I’m just saying it’s a sad state of affairs. But one day nature will have the final say-so I do believe.

However, scientists (Dr. James Gordon Prather, Sir Robert Robinson and possibly others) have pointed out that the CO2 in the atmosphere appears to be of biological origin in that it lacks the carbon 13 isotope that plants have difficulty synthesizing. They also point out that the earth’s hydrocarbons the deeper one drills into the earth do not appear to be lacking the carbon 13 isotope and therefore are likely abiotic. Have you researched this topic and do you have any information to share about it?

My old (1983) copy of “Stable Isotopes in Sedimentary Geology, SEPM” gives a range of d13C per mille of around -23 to -35 for bulk of plants, and d13C -20 to -30 for crude oil and non-marine derived methane. When organic material is buried, it passes through a zone of sulphate reduction, then methanogenesis which produces very light methane (d13C ~-100), before proceeding into the oil window. Be very careful about simply eyeballing the numbers because there are fractionation processes working with depth/temperature and chemical evolution.

Thank you for the reply and the useful information. However, I do have some questions. Does your (1983) copy of “Stable Isotopes in Sedimentary Geology, SEPM” indicate at what depths the crude assays were taken? The d13C -20 to -30 readings for crude oil may have been taken from shallow depths, where as you indicated processing of organic material takes place. At greater depths other processes may be involved. For example, you mentioned methane production. Methane can also be produced from iron oxide, calcite and water under extreme heat and pressure (50K gigapascals or more). Experiments at Sandia Laboratories has confirmed this I’ve read.

A simple equation calculates the entire temperature trajectory (since accurately measured) with an accuracy of 88%. When calibrated to measurements prior to 1990, it has calculated temperatures since then with a standard deviation of less than 0.1C. Google “Verification of Natural Climate Change” to see what works.

Don’t forget about when that alarmist scientist, Carl Sagan, predicted a nuclear winter effect from the Iraqi oil fires. He said there would be devastation to farm crops and even a year without a summer. Fred Singer, the voice of reason, stood up to him on nightline and said they would have a local effect that would last only a few days.
Of course, Singer did not “support” the Iraqi oil fires, but just tried to assess their impact in a reasonable manner.